Its first generation, comprised by figures such as Carl Menger, Friedrich von Wieser, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, developed the theory of marginal utility, a conservative rejoinder to the labor theory of value. The second generation, led by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, translated it into an analytical and political orthodoxy. But Schumpeter was a dark horse, in both theoretical and political terms. A conservative who held a ministerial portfolio in a socialist government in Austria after World War I, a teacher of mathematical economics whose published works contain hardly a single equation, Schumpeter was a complex, protean figure whose most enduring quality was his contrarian brilliance.

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, his best-known work, originally published in 1942, represents the zenith both of Schumpeter’s brilliance and of his idiosyncrasies. It combines one of the most remarkable advances in the sociology of capitalism, in the form of the concept of creative destruction, with the contention that capitalism itself was, in the long term, not viable. The origins of both are to be found in a reading of the work of Karl Marx, which, while problematic in some aspects, is remarkably sympathetic and subtle, particularly for a man with Schumpeter’s intellectual pedigree.

In its original incarnation, Schumpeter’s book was meant as an attempt to tease out the implications of the Great Depression and the rise of the war economies for the continuing development of the capitalist system. But, although the decades long postwar economic boom seemed to constitute an implicit refutation of Schumpeter’s ideas, the coming transformation of capitalism wrought by changes in the technical composition of capital may give them a new relevance.

Schumpeter began work on Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in the late 1930s. after completing the second volume his work on business cycles. That latter work was within the ambit of Austrian orthodoxy in terms of its prescriptions, if not in terms of the underlying diagnosis. In contrast to Keynes, who had argued in The General Theory that governments could combat economic downturns by engaging in countercyclical deficit spending, Schumpeter viewed business cycles as unavoidable consequence of patterns of innovation and ossification in the economy.

Austerity nap. Brussels, June 2015.

This approach differed from Austrians like Mises, who viewed business cycles as linked to the excessive expansion of bank credit, but neither Schumpeter nor Mises viewed government intervention as an appropriate response. However, in light of this difference, their underlying views of the operations of markets and the developmental processes of capitalism are much the same.

By the time that Schumpeter was fully engaged in work on his next book times had changed in ways that would have a pronounced impact on his thinking. The industrialized world had been lifted out of the Great Depression by the requirements of war production. The demands of military manufacturing transformed state and economic structures in all the major participants in the conflict. There was, at least to some degree, a structural convergence between liberal capitalist and fascist states, with planning and centralized direction of production becoming the norm in many segments of the economy, particularly (but not exclusively) those characterized by factory production.

But even before the major transformations of the war economies, there was a visible change in the structure of capitalism. Schumpeter had made his reputation in his Theory of Economic Development (1911). There had sung the praises of the entrepreneur, a sort of economic knight errant whose social role was to provide a dynamism that would revolutionize sectors of the economy that had grown stagnant. By the late 1930s it was less clear to Schumpeter that the classically conceived role of the entrepreneur could be maintained in the era of, massive, vertically integrated productive units.

Schumpeter was not alone in recognizing this. An extensive literature grew up in the early 1940s on the theme of the problems facing free market capitalism. Although disparate in political orientation and approach, writers such as James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution, 1941), Friedrich Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1943), and Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944), saw free market capitalism as conceived by the like of Smith and Ricardo and subject to structural transformation (if not threatened with extinction).

Schumpeter had always been something of an iconoclast. Asked why he was assisting the work of the Socialization Commission in postwar Austria, his response was, “If one wishes to commit suicide, it is best to have a doctor’s help.” Further examples of Schumpeter’s tendency to insouciance and overstatement could be multiplied without end. His favored milieu was that of the Vienna coffee houses, and he never lost the propensity to argue and exaggerate in the way common to that scene. This had the positive effect of making it easier for him to adopt (or at least to try out) heterodox positions. But it also, at least at times, gave colleagues and opponents the impression that he wasn’t serious.

Adidas for the poor. Brussels, June 2015.

This capacity for heterodoxy is clearly in evidence in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which opens with a serious analysis of the economic and sociological views of Karl Marx. Schumpeter’s analysis is thorough, running to nearly 60 pages, and avoids the simplistic dismissiveness typical of Austrian School analyses of Marx (see for instance Böhm-Bawerk’sZum Abschluss des Marxschen Systems).

Brutally simplified, Schumpeter argued that Marx had been right about the non-viability of capitalism in the long term, but for the wrong reason. It wasn’t class conflict that would bring about the transition to socialism but rather the processes of concentration of technology and capitalism itself that would cause this transition.

One of the (many) peculiarities of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is that in the course of describing the downfall of dynamic, free market capitalism, Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction,” now a perennial favorite in neoliberal circles, to describe the processes by which entrepreneurial innovation restructures segments of the economy. Although useful as a description of how capitalism (or at least a certain variety of capitalism) functions, creative destruction is oddly out of kilter with the larger message of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

There is an interesting homology between Marx’s and Schumpeter’s analyses of the long term developmental trajectories of capitalism: the expanding role of technology sounds the death knell for the dynamic market. In Marx’s case, it was a matter of the organic composition of capital, the tendency of fixed capital to constitute a progressively larger proportion of total capital. In Schumpeter’s case, it was a matter of technological (and capital) advantages closing off access to market sectors to new entrants. The long-term result in both cases was an ossification of capitalism. Marx also thought that this process would result in declining rates of profit, a view that Schumpeter did not hold. But, in other respects, their views were parallel.

The intellectual stock of both Marx and Schumpeter was rather low during the decades following World War II. Marx’s name was inextricably linked (with somewhat less justice than was commonly thought) with the monstrosity of Stalinism. This implied not only grotesque and inhumane political repression but also, especially in the latter decades of its existence, economic malaise running from stagnation to collapse.

At the same time, Schumpeter was viewed as a theoretical outlier. The rising influences of Keynesianism, beginning in the 1930s ,and the institutionally established in the Bretton Woods system, consigned Schumpeter’s thought to the margins. But even when the neoclassical approach began to regroup in the 1960s with the rise of freshwater economics, Schumpeter’s deviation from free market nostrums meant that the rising theoretical tide did not lift all boats.

Against the fare hike. Berlin, July 2015.

Do Schumpeter’s ideas have anything to tell us, either about the current conjuncture or about how the increasing role of technology in the current economy will influence its long-term trajectory? The history of economic development in the postwar economies has been one of illusions.

For three decades after World War II, the dream of a middle class capitalism in which the top was taxed to prevent immiseration of the bottom persisted until it was overwhelmed by the dogmas of self-regulating markets and the real business cycle. Successive booms, first in internet technology then in housing, propped up rates of development and profit artificially, but the rise of the financialized version of capitalism dictates that long term rates of growth will be below 2%, and the overall structure of world markets persistently unstable.

But it is the influence of technology that will tell in the long term. Schumpeter (like Marx) foresaw massive concentrations of capital and technology, and one would be hard pressed to deny that this is occurring. The rise of automated production and the concentration of resources and expertise in large, vertically integrated productive units are accelerating. The entrepreneurs of today are less interested in building their own competitive enterprises than in creating something large enough to be bought out by Google or Facebook.

It is, at this moment, hard to imagine that production would at some point be determined by councils of experts, as Schumpeter thought it eventually would. But the increasingly oligopolistic structures of modern markets for everything from foodstuffs, to toothpaste, to industrial components means that productive decisions are made in ways that are very similar and may become virtually the same.

Whether automation has the effect of reducing profits though the elimination of human labor as a source of profits, or does so by reducing the pool of consumers, the overall outcome is likely to be roughly similar. Stripped of the need for productive workers, and confronting the concentration of purchasing power in ever-smaller circles, the days of rough and ready market capitalism seem numbered. But the mode of its passing is not unimportant.

If the relations of power underlying the system are not addressed, then what is likely is not the end of capitalism but simply a process of rebranding. In any case, Schumpeter provides an interesting way of looking at what will happen if capitalism dies not with a bang, but a whimper.

A few miles from the town two sowars met me, but after escorting me for some distance they left me, and taking the wrong road, I found myself shortly on a slope above the town, not among the living but the dead. Such a City of Death I have never seen.

A whole hour was occupied in riding through it without reaching its limits. Fifty thousand gravestones are said to stand on the reddish-gray gravel between the hill and the city wall, mere unhewn slabs of gray stone, from six inches to as many feet in height, row beyond row to the limit of vision—300,000 people, they say, are buried there.

There is no suggestion of “life and immortality.” Weird, melancholy, and terribly malodorous, owing to the shallowness of the graves, the impression made by this vast cemetery is solely painful. The tombs are continued up to the walls and even among the houses, and having been much disturbed there is the sad spectacle of human skulls and bones lying about, being gnawed by dogs.

The graveyard side of Sujbulāk is fouler and filthier than anything I have seen, and the odours, even in this beautiful weather, are appalling. The centre of each alley is a broken channel with a broken pavement on each side. These channels were obviously constructed for water, but now contain only a black and stagnant horror, hardly to be called a fluid, choked with every kind of refuse.

The bazaars are narrow, dark, and busy, full of Russian commodities, leather goods, ready-made clothing, melons, grapes, and pop-corn. The crowds of men mostly wore the Kurdish or Turkish costume, but black-robed and white-turbaned Seyyids and mullahs were not wanting.

Anti-ISIS demo. Berlin, August 2014.

Sujbulāk, the capital of Northern Persian Kurdistan, and the residence of a governor, is quite an important entrepôt for furs, in which it carries on a large trade with Russia, and a French firm, it is said, buys up fur rugs to the value of several hundred thousand francs annually. It also does a large business with the Kurdish tribes of the adjacent mountains and the Turkish nomads of the plains, and a considerable trade in gall-nuts. It has twenty small mosques, three hammams, some very inferior caravanserais, and a few coffee-houses. Its meat bazaar and its grain and pulse bazaars are capacious and well supplied.

It has a reputed population of 5000 souls. Kurds largely predominate, but there are so many Turks that the Turkish Government has lately built a very conspicuous consulate, with the aspect of a fortress, and has appointed a consul to protect the interests of its subjects. There are 120 Armenians, who make wine and arak, and are usurers, and gold and silver smiths. The Jews get their living by money-lending, peddling drugs, dyeing cotton goods, selling groceries, and making gold and silver lace.

There is a garrison, of 1000 men nominally, for the town and district are somewhat turbulent, and a conflict is always imminent between the Kurds and Turks, who are Sunnis, and the small Persian population, which is Shia. The altitude of Sujbulāk is 4770 feet. Here I have come upon the track of Ida Pfeiffer, who travelled in the Urmi region more than forty years ago, when travelling in Persia was full of risks, and much more difficult in all respects than it is now.

Rojava, not Syria. Neukölln, May 2015.

The Sanak, though clear and bright, is fouled by many abominations, and by the ceaseless washing of clothes above the town; there are no pure wells, and all people who care about what they drink keep asses constantly bringing water from an uncontaminated part of the river, two miles off. Even the governor has to depend on this supply.

Sujbulāk looks very well from this camp, with the bright river in the foreground, and above it, irregularly grouped on a rising bank, the façade, terraces, and towers of the governor’s palace, the fort-like Turkish consulate, and numbers of good dwelling-houses, with balakhanas painted blue or pink, or covered with arabesques in red, with projecting lattice windows of dark wood, and balconies overhanging the water.

This shingle where I am encamped is the Rotten Row of the town, and is very lively this evening, for numbers of Kurds have been galloping their horses here, and performing feats of horsemanship before the admiring eyes of hundreds of promenaders, male and female, most of the latter unveiled. As all have to cross the ford where the river is some inches above a man’s knees, the effect is grotesque, and even the women have no objection to displaying their round white limbs in the clear water. The ladies of the Governor’s andarun sent word that food and quarters had been prepared for me since noon, but I excused myself on the plea of excessive fatigue.

This message was followed by a visit from the governor’s foster-mother, an unveiled jolly woman, of redundant proportions, wearing remarkably short petticoats, which displayed limbs like pillars. A small woman attended her, and a number of Kurd men, superbly dressed, and wearing short two-edged swords, with ebony hilts ornamented with incrustations of very finely-worked filigree silver. These weapons are made here. The lady has been to Mecca, and evinces much more general intelligence than the secluded women. She took a dagger from one of the attendants, and showed me with much go how the thrusts which kill are made.

The pouring rain is making us even more nostalgic and we remember how powerful it felt to be part of last year’s demonstration in London, when more than 150,000 people marched. In the spirit of that march, we plan and execute our action, which took place inside the heart of the British Museum and in a Central London Barclays Bank on Tottenham Court Road.

The British Museum was highlighted because it is a symbol of colonialism, and Britain’s role in the Zionist project has been well-documented. Barclays was targeted as it is a named shareholder in several major arms firms including Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, all of which play an important role in arming the Israeli military.

Barclays profiting from the occupation. London, Saturday.

Images of Palestinian topics in the media are largely dominated by destruction, blood, pain, and terror. Palestinians are often depicted as Islamists, terrorists, savages, or poor, helpless war victims. Their homes are shown as slums and ruins, with images of walled-off land. Such caricatures are often perpetuated by British news outlets.

Doing the Dabke in the British Museum lobby.

Therefore it is highly relevant to protest culture with culture, and stand up against cultural dominance and appropriation by demonstrating an alternative, and showing that the Palestinian spirit is not broken. As Mohammed Omer said in a recent article, “We are still here, rebuilding as best we can, sleeping as best as we are allowed, because we intend to stay, as much as others may want us gone.”

We also dance to express our concern that one of effects of the UK’s Prevent Strategy has been that Palestine-related activism is effectively under surveillance. Individual freedoms are under attack, activists are harassed, and school children who express support for Palestine are increasingly referred to counter-radicalisation programmes.

Stomping in the courtyard.

The Dabke is an Arab dance that originated in the ancient Levant. It is believed to have been used to scare evil forces away from crops. This accounts for its rhythmic jumps. It is a celebratory dance, though in Palestine, it has been politicized since the Nakba, in 1948.

Israeli performance artists have been increasingly erasing the Palestinian character of the dance, through a policy of cultural appropriation alongside deliberate erasure of Palestinian culture. For instance, New York-based Israeli choreographer Zvi Gotheiner (ZviDance) has taken on the Dabke, without adequately reflecting its Palestinian influences. In June 2012, when the New York Times covered “Israeli Dabke,” Arab Palestinian culture wasn’t mentioned at all, once again denying their existence and history in the land.

As Roger Sheety argues, this cultural appropriation is a “political policy of the state that seeks to erase Palestine from historical memory, particularly within Western discourse.”

Dabke revolutionaries.

London Palestine Action uses the Dabke in direct action to support the boycotting of Israeli products in supermarkets and beauty stores, while other groups have highlighted arms trading and organised demonstrations against apartheid. It is supported by Al Zaytouna Dance Theatre, a Palestinian dance group in London that uses the Dabke in its traditional form, but also fuses it with contemporary dance and visual arts. Choreographers like les ballets C de la B, and Hildegard De Vuyst regularly collaborate with Palestinian performers, resulting in dance forms like the Dabke used in their production Badke.

It is our desire to commemorate the brutality of Israel’s offensive in Gaza last summer, but we also want to change the narrative. As Khalid Qatamish, the Director of El Funoun Music and Dance Ensemble mentions, “the dance is not only a sacred tradition; it is very much tied to dreams of liberation.” We will be back to dance the dabke with our friends from Stop the Arms Fair at the horrific DSEi arms fair on 7 September 2015.

PSYOP: Post- 9/11 Leaflets seems put together more as a zine than an academic text, which has its positives and negatives, but very much explains the intention of these leaflets: “Capture their minds and their hearts will follow.”

Propaganda in the modern age is usually thought of as something high-tech and probably Internet-based. After all, there are countless examples that can be easily seen or at least easily sought out: from the extremely radical websites of groups like ISIL and countless pro-life organizations to the comparatively benign Facebook and Twitter feeds coming from mainstream political candidates. But the impact of online propaganda is tempered by the inherent nuance in being able to independently look up a second opinion.

However, the ability to refute information and argue accurately is directly tied to having access to both differing opinions and knowledge itself. If you cannot find books and articles on the subject and don’t have the technology needed to access the Internet, propaganda has a decidedly different impact. This is felt especially in the extreme poverty of war zones, which not surprisingly are historically also one of the most heavily propagandized environments.

The most basic and most popular type of wartime propaganda is the simple leaflet, which can be manufactured for pennies and dropped by the thousands over enemy territory. These one or two-sided pieces of paper, usually just a few inches in size, are purposely minimal, oftentimes containing only a handful of words and a single image.

US pamphlet samples.

The wartime leaflet is not an attempt, like the earlier mentioned websites, of convincing people that your viewpoints are correct and they should join up. Instead, the idea here is to convince the enemy that not only are they fighting a lost cause but that they should probably just give up immediately before they’re killed. It is purposely and exceptionally blunt. The design, like the message, is straight and to the point.

A recent example from the fight against ISIL illustrates this perfectly: in this leaflet, reported to have been dropped by the thousands over Raqqa, Syria in May, a militant is pictured wedged between the hour and minute hands on a clock soon to strike midnight. The text of the leaflet reads in part: “We have killed many of your leaders and countless fighters. We can strike you anytime, anywhere, and you are powerless to stop us. We will never quit, and you are destined to lose your war. The clock of your destruction is ticking, and zero hour is very near.”

The book is quite literally just hundreds of these leaflets, page after page of images and text in translation. It is overwhelming to look through, which seems appropriate given the subject matter. The editors seem intent on not editorializing or really offering any kind of explanation.

Divided into sections for Iraq and Afghanistan, the book also includes a brief background about the nature and history of propaganda leaflets, culled from two US Army documents: “Psychological Operations Field Manual No. 33-1” from 1979 and “Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Media Subcourse PO-0816” from 1983. It’s unnerving to realize how this tactic hasn’t had to change much in the past few decades.

According to a blurb on the inside of the back cover, the book’s content was collected online from various sources. The images are low-res and the translations brief. There are no pretenses at this being any kind of academic or even journalistic source. It’s a historical document, a collection of raw material that is still very much unseen outside of the areas where it was originally distributed.

To that end, PSYOP: Post- 9/11 Leaflets: Operation Enduring Freedom, despite being far from ideal, is very much necessary. Ten years after it was published, the leaflets contained in the book are still very interesting and extremely shocking to look at.

The candidacy of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders has energized this anti-Clinton faction. Even if Sanders himself has little chance of winning the general election, they reason, the strength of his progressive platform will either force Hillary left or open up a void for a more electable Democrat to exploit.

It’s the latter prospect that most worries the Clinton team. They are fairly sure — perhaps too sure, given what transpired in 2008 — that pragmatism will eventually lead many current Sanders supporters to betray his upstart campaign. The inevitable turnover coming to the Supreme Court is reason enough to fear having Republicans in charge of both Congress and the White House. But they also sense a rising anger in their base, particularly public sector employees battered by the downsizing of state and local governments, that will not be assuaged by more pandering to Wall Street.

For these unhappy Democrats, there is a clear continuum between the Clinton White House of the 1990s and the Obama White House of today. For all their accomplishments — not least of which was being branded “socialists” by the Right — both can be critiqued for permitting an ideological bait-and-switch operation, in which the rhetoric of the 1960s is used to sell the Realpolitik of the post-Reagan Era. No matter how personally compelling Bill, Barack, Hillary and Al Gore may be, no matter how much they deserve respect for weathering brutal conservative attacks, they have presided over the dismantling of the very institutions that the Democratic Party is supposed to protect.

Even the Affordable Health Care Act, which followed through on the promise of Hillary Clinton’s efforts during her husband’s first two years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, can be considered part of this deceit, since it is turning the gears of Federal bureaucracy to benefit insurance companies even more than the at-risk groups it was ostensibly created to serve. On the issues that Democratic voters who aren’t wealthy care about most, their centrism feels like butter scraped over too much bread.

That’s why Bernie Sanders has made such a strong showing so far, as his candidacy taps into the reservoir of resistance that gave rise to the Occupy movement back in 2011. And it’s why he is being viciously attacked for being a clueless white progressive, unwilling or unable to recognize the role that racism plays in contemporary American society.

It doesn’t matter whether Sanders has legitimate reasons for prioritizing economic concerns over everything else. The fact that he has been reluctant to mobilize the post-Civil Rights Movement commonplaces that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — though in different ways and for different reasons — have repeatedly used to consolidate their support in the Democratic Party is being treated as evidence that he doesn’t understand what people of color need or want. Nor does it help that this reluctance has manifested itself at a time when every month seems to bring a new high-profile case of police brutality in which white officers have done unconscionable things to black and brown men and women.

To be sure, Sanders’ insistence on not straying from his populist talking points can be read as a sign of virtue. There’s something admirable about not clambering onto the bandwagon, even when doing so would strengthen your candidacy. But that is not what is happening. Whether Hillary’s campaign is directly influencing the mainstream media or merely benefiting from a preference for the tried and true, there is little doubt that an effort to sabotage Sanders from within the liberal camp is well underway.

Even considering the argument that ending racism will require ending capitalism first is reason enough to be tarred and feathered as an example of white privilege. With Republican candidates seemingly going out of their way to antagonize as many people of color as possible, the clearest path for a Democratic victory in 2016 is one that exploits the legacy of white supremacy in order to inspire African-Americans and Latinos to cast their ballots.

Although it may be true that both groups are held back primarily by economic disadvantages, supporters of Hillary Clinton have a strong interest in making it political suicide to say out loud. They stand to benefit from preventing Democrats from thinking about racism and capitalism together. Perhaps it is unfair to ascribe such cynical motivations to them. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether they believe in this separation or are merely seeking to instrumentalize it. Either way, the segregation of outrage will prevent the destabilization of the social order that the party’s wealthy donors fear most.

Z follows the story of a leftist political rally in an unnamed European city. The assembly is officially tolerated, but unofficially subjected to censorship and repression. The most dramatic scenes of the film feature the city’s elites enjoying a Russian ballet, while fascist thugs are hired to harass the dissidents, and assassinate their charismatic leader.

Z ends with a chase scene, as a principled and politically-neutral magistrate uncovers the true nature of a murder. Protests and unrest gather steam across the country, and following the release of his findings, the military declares martial law.

Z’s portrayal ofbarely hidden alliances between violent street criminals and an authoritarian state resonate strongly with Pakistani sensibilities. Much of the country’s history since the 1968 – 1969 movement against Ayub Khan has been defined by such dynamics, which from 1973 – 1977 slowly brought General Zia ul-Haq to power with his imposed doctrine of Islamization.

In Z, the Chief of Police tells high-ranking members of the armed forces that the population needs to be “cured” of “a disease of ‘isms.’” Zia could have delivered the same statement, leading to the theocratic excesses and savage militancy that defines Pakistan today.

The most striking part of Z is this first scene. After an agricultural slideshow about herbicides, the Chief of Police is introduced to discuss the need for ideological herbicide. A “disease of ‘isms’” is infecting the country, which is described as a collection of communism, anarchism, socialism, and the like. The Chief of Police says bluntly that “an ideological disease is like mildew and requires preventative measures,” proceeding to outline strategies for counterinsurgency.

It is intriguing to see how little has changed since Z’s 1969 release. Pakistan continues to maintain uneasy relationships with religious militants, and reactionary scholars, as a continuation of the “preventative measures” that it has been implementing since the 1970s. The Cold War may be over, but the concern about ‘isms’ continues to affect every section of Pakistani society, from its economic policies, to its official culture, to the Ruet-e-Hilal Committee that just met to announce the date of Eid al-Fitr.

Of course, this is less alarming than current rhetorical trends in Europe, which have become enamored with a meme of “contagions” emanating from Greece. Initially, the “contagion” was strictly financial, and required global preventative measures to protect against the Greek economy. However, the real threat was always implicitly political. Now, in the midst of continued uncertainty about Greece’s future, the phrase “political contagion” has become more popular.

Costas-Gavras could have written the reports himself, with Greece being rhetorically described as Patient Zero in a pandemic of anti-austerity politics that risks infecting the rest of the continent. No friend of the left, European Council President Donald Tusk essentially said as much, when he warned of a political situation similar to that of 1968, stopping short of using the phrase “ideological mildew.”

Greece could once again be similar to Pakistan, in that the need to confront political contagions forces elites to throw out their official loyalty to democracy and liberal parliamentary republicanism. As Zia’s supporters realized in the 1970s, democracy does not allow for elites to fully institute the containment and extermination strategies necessary to “cure” a population of ideological mildew.

The Chief of Police cries out that his country is a democracy at the beginning of the film, however by its conclusion, he is perfectly willing to throw out the official line in favour of authoritarianism. This rhetoric of “contagions” makes it seem increasingly likely that democracy will be considered as laughable in the European Union as it is in Pakistan, thrown out in a second if circumstances call for it.

Both Fascism and nationalism regard the State as the foundation of all rights and the source of all values in the individuals composing it. For the one as for the other the State is not a consequence—it is a principle. But in the case of nationalism, the relation which individualistic liberalism, and for that matter socialism also, assumed between individual and State is inverted. Since the State is a principle, the individual becomes a consequence—he is something which finds an antecedent in the State: the State limits him and determines his manner of existence, restricting his freedom, binding him to a piece of ground whereon he was born, whereon he must live and will die. In the case of Fascism, State and individual are one and the same things, or rather, they are inseparable terms of a necessary synthesis.

Nationalism, in fact, founds the State on the concept of nation, the nation being an entity which transcends the will and the life of the individual because it is conceived as objectively existing apart from the consciousness of individuals, existing even if the individual does nothing to bring it into being. For the nationalist, the nation exists not by virtue of the citizen’s will, but as datum, a fact, of nature.

For Fascism, on the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual creation. It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a material presupposition, is not a datum of nature. The nation, says the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter’s concrete, political manifestation. For the Fascist, the State is always in fieri. It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious responsibility towards it.

But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism.

Prefers ‘center-right': Marine Le Pen. Strasbourg, July 2015.

Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an entity preëxisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be recognized or known. The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation and could understand, appreciate and exalt it. The authority of the State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition. It could not depend on the people—rather the people depended on the State and on the State’s authority as the source of the life which they lived and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was, therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses through the power conferred upon it by its origins.

The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic State par excellence. The relationship between State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses. Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the Duce the thought and will of the masses. Hence the enormous task which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the Party.

Geert Wilders, speaking at a PEGIDA rally. Dresden, April 2015.

On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its greatest social and constitutional reform—the foundation of the Corporations of Syndicates. In this reform Fascism took over from syndicalism the notion of the moral and educational function of the syndicate. But the Corporations of Syndicates were necessary in order to reduce the syndicates to State discipline and make them an expression of the State’s organism from within. The Corporation of Syndicates are a device through which the Fascist State goes looking for the individual in order to create itself through the individual’s will. But the individual it seeks is not the abstract political individual whom the old liberalism took for granted. He is the only individual who can ever be found, the individual who exists as a specialized productive force, and who, by the fact of his specialization, is brought to unite with other individuals of his same category and comes to belong with them to the one great economic unit which is none other than the nation.

This great reform is already well under way. Toward it nationalism, syndicalism, and even liberalism itself, were already tending in the past. For even liberalism was beginning to criticize the older forms of political representation, seeking some system of organic representation which would correspond to the structural reality of the State.

The Fascist conception of liberty merits passing notice. The Duce of Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of “Force or consent?”; and he concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist.

Liberalism broke the circle above referred to, setting the individual against the State and liberty against authority. What the liberal desired was liberty as against the State, a liberty which was a limitation of the State; though the liberal had to resign himself, as the lesser of the evils, to a State which was a limitation on liberty. The absurdities inherent in the liberal concept of freedom were apparent to liberals themselves early in the Nineteenth Century. It is no merit of Fascism to have again indicated them. Fascism has its own solution of the paradox of liberty and authority. The authority of the State is absolute. It does not compromise, it does not bargain, it does not surrender any portion of its field to other moral or religious principles which may interfere with the individual conscience. But on the other hand, the State becomes a reality only in the consciousness of its individuals. And the Fascist corporative State supplies a representative system more sincere and more in touch with realities than any other previously devised and is therefore freer than the old liberal State.

A promoter turned manager gestures to the self-interest of those who were to care for her. Blake Fields, the boyfriend-husband who turned her onto crack and heroin—as if their relationship weren’t compulsively damaging enough—dumps her, but shows up again when her career takes off. (His wardrobe is hilariously on the nose as villain with popped collars, fedoras, and scarves galore; if a fiction film, this costuming would have been declared too much.) And Mitchell Winehouse dominates, with the typical stage parent narrative: That person who was all but absent during Amy Winehouse’s childhood, but who showed up later on to manage (or rather feast on) her career.

The footage from the documentary, Amy: The Untold Story supplies not only many images and interviews, but exists as condemnation of this scavenger parent and the media that comply. Indeed, this film exists thanks to the amazing amount of footage of Amy, from mobile phone video to paparazzi invasions, to coverage of her concerts. This alone is damning enough: She was subject to a constant gaze.

This attention is hardly surprising. Amy Winehouse had a stunning voice and a charisma that makes much of the early footage a joy to watch. An eye-roll, simultaneously playful and scornful makes short work of idiotic interview questions. Her adoration of jazz gives her the enthusiast’s edge; it is infectious. Meanwhile, her commitment to writing her own songs lest she become an empty pop idol results in the most personal work writ and sung large. Very large.

So how is it that this figures almost too little in the documentary? One can see the rationale. This larger than life voice was cut short, was eroded by addiction and disease. A film that gives us glimpses of this only to take it away for the last third or so creates a powerful narrative of loss even before this slow death scene finds an end. But at the same time, this is wrong. It is wrong that the film is not about Winehouse, really, but about how everyone saw her and made use of her. Her best girl friends may be the only ones truly exempt from this charge, as theirs is a story of loss and love.

Yasin bey (aka Mos Def) emerges as one of the few industry people, alongside Tony Bennett, who relate to her almost purely through music. However, almost all those receiving the most interview attention seem to tell a story of Amy Winehouse as a projection of their own desire. Even Nicky Shymansky, a longtime friend and onetime manager describes her in a way that lets slips his unrequited love for her. She could make one feel the best or the worst, he says. This description transforms her into someone who exists only in relation to others. And this is how it is in so many descriptions: Winehouse is a projection of fantasies and nightmares. This is puzzling given that this dynamic person would likely have been so much more.

But actually, it’s not puzzling at all. This is a film about the consumption of Amy. And whether Kapadia acknowledges it or not, the film is a performance of this consumption. Kapadia takes to task the machine that consumes performers until they can give no more, but he, too, is involved in the economy he indicts. The copious footage is his for the using, and for the manipulation. Video is slowed down, and Amy Winehouse captured in grotesque poses to illustrate the damage of addiction. The Ken Burns pan and scan of photographs repeatedly lingers on the belly, breasts, thighs and bottom of the young woman, making Kapadia’s gaze no different than that of Terry Richardson, who photographs Winehouse as Blake fondles (and exposes) her bottom.

Some might be tempted to describe her bulimia as part of her unruliness, much like her addiction. But this is in fact the neoliberal subject in excess. The zaftig North London Jewish girl uses her special diet to develop the industry appropriate skinniness that is so desired and adulated. Some might declare this a tortured artist who wanted to disappear, but the sheer amount of attention suggests otherwise: To disappear or to be as small as possible is how to be loved, seen, and accepted, in the industry and by the men around her.

As much as eating disorders and addictions are, in part, a matter of an individual, each moment in this film reveals how the industry benefits from this ill health. This is not a story of tormented individual genius, but how genius becomes tormented, used, and abused in a system of relentless consumption—in this case the twinned economies of the patriarchy and capitalism. Multiple moments in Amy make this ravenous Siamese beast visible, but perhaps none so much as her father suggesting she not go to rehab (or to any kind of rest) because there are “contractual obligations” to fulfill.

This is a woman who could produce music, but when not doing so according to the timetable and work-demands of the industry, was seen as fallow, a shirker, if not completely rebellious. The jokes Jay Leno makes at her expense are cruel, but may also offer insight into the anxieties of a business that is relentless and demands relentless effort. Pity the person who cannot or will not keep up.

Amy is compelling and tragic for its indictment of the self-interested people—mostly men— who surround Winehouse and the self-interested industries—media and music—that benefit from this feasting upon her. But it stumbles as it refuses a necessary reflexive and self-aware gaze.

Kapadia benefits from all this footage, including the hideous paparazzi images that plagued Amy even during the most innocuous moments. He uses the narratives constructed by those surrounding and benefiting from her. He puts all of this to use to serve his narrative, his pleasure, and his place in a film industry. Kapadia rightly wags his finger at music, news and entertainment media, and the men in Amy Winehouse’s life, but he neglects to put himself in his own line of sight.

Self-consciousness would help mitigate some of what’s on screen, which is, no matter what, a damning indictment of patriarchy and capitalism, and offers, at many points, hints of a true force of nature.

Photograph courtesy of Chris Beckett. Published under a Creative Commons license.

Evans has, moreover, made important contributions to the public use of history. Most prominent among these was his work as an expert witness in the celebrated lawsuit stemming from Deborah Lipstadt’s designation of the historian David Irving (correctly) as a Holocaust denier. Evans’ systematic, evidence-based dismantling of Irving’s web of lies and distortions, as illustrated in the trial transcript and in his subsequent book about the experience (Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial), is a model for the aspiring historian, as is the clear and unassuming prose in which it is couched. It is well that historical scholarship has so apt a practitioner and defender, for the questions surrounding National Socialism and the Holocaust are some of the most profound facing the modern world, and the threats posed by liars and cynics, but also by enthusiasts are legion. The manner in which Evans has taken up the cudgels against them is, in the most literal sense, exemplary.

The Third Reich in History and Memory brings together 28 occasional pieces written by Evans over the course of the last fifteen years, mostly book reviews, some of which have been aggregated (when they address a common topic). Oddly enough, it is the predominance of book reviews that makes this is an excellent book for non-specialists, as well as for those well-versed in the history and historiography of National Socialism and the Holocaust. Evans’ familiarity with these vast literatures is encyclopedic and he easily could, but does not, fall into the common error of the scholarly virtuoso of assuming a similarly expansive knowledge in one’s readers (or not caring about it).

Evans writes in a clear and unaffected style. More importantly, he is careful in each instance to let the reader know what it is at stake in the matter under discussion, rather than simply assuming his readers know this, or relying on the gravitas of the topic itself to make a suitable impression. Thus, in his review of Heike Görtemacher’s 2011 biography of Eva Braun, Eva Braun: Life with Hitler, Evans lets us know why it is, outside of the kind of morbid curiosity for which less scholarly treatments of Braun’s life have been fodder. A discussion of Braun’s life and her relationship with Hitler not only answers questions about her, but also illuminates the dealings and tensions that went on within the circles closest to Hitler himself. Framed in this way, Evans’ assessment of Görtemacher’s book carries far greater weight than it might have if the interests of the reader had not been properly engaged at the outset.

The collection is broken down by subject areas, running roughly chronologically from the prehistory of the Holocaust in late 19th and early 20th century German colonialism all the way through the postwar issues such as reconstruction of the memory of the Holocaust. But the meat of the book is in its central sections which address, often in overlapping fashion, issues such as the degree of popular support for Hitler, the levels of coercion applied to German society to achieve it, the economics of the Nazi state, and the relationship of the Nazi Party to the preexisting structures of the state.

The question of consent versus coercion is of particular importance for Evans. This is hardly surprising given how large it has loomed in discussions of the origins of the Holocaust in the last two decades, and in particular in the wake of the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s deeply flawed Hitler’s Willing Executioners. That book is not directly addressed, although readers of Evans’ writings on the topic (such as his analysis of the origins of National Socialism in The Coming of the Third Reich) will already be clear how little he rates Goldhagen’s approach.

Evans is more interested in responding to claims from both ends of the political spectrum that popular support for Hitler was widespread and generally voluntary. One commonly cited basis for this claim is that, by the mid-1930s, the concentration camps contained only 4000 or so inmates, down from tens of thousands in the early days of the regime. As Evans notes at several points, this has little to do with the broadening of popular voluntary support for Hitler, and much to do with the fact that by that point, the apparatus of terror had been shifted to the state judiciary.

Tagging Turkish households. Brussels, July 2015.

Support for Hitler, and for the Nazis generally (which was not always the same thing) had varied sources ranging from ideological commitment or fascination with the person of Hitler at one end of the spectrum, to simple advantage-seeking at the other. Acquiescence, which comprises a much larger segment of the population, was generally a matter of self-interest, whether in terms of professional advancement, or profiting from “Aryanization” of Jewish property, or the fear (by no means unjustified) of being tortured or killed for manifesting dissent.

One apposite example of this is Evans’s review of Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Without the background provided by Evans, it might not be obvious to the casual reader either that Aly was a historian of pronounced leftist sympathies, or that he was among the most extreme of the functionalist interpreters of the Holocaust (i.e. those who see it more as a result of dynamics within and around the regime rather than as a direct expression of the intentions either of Hitler or his immediate cohort). This is important, because it illuminates what is at stake when Aly claims that the German population (at least those who fit the restrictions of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft) were convinced to support the regime with commodities stolen from its victims.

This approach, which is part of a large tendency to view National Socialism as one form that modern capitalist societies can take on (albeit a very extreme one), is an expression of Aly’s leftist politics. And in terms of general approach, he is not wrong. But, as Evans points out, and as any careful reader of Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction will know, in this case quite the opposite is true. As Evans reminds us, Tooze showed in extensive detail the ways in which the commodity producing sectors of the Nazi economy were starved for resources by demands of rearmament. While Evans gives Aly credit for his commitment to primary source research, he nonetheless (and quite correctly) notes that Aly’s evidence doesn’t make the cut in terms of an adequate defense of his thesis.

Evans is judicious but also unsparing in his criticisms. His review of the edited collection Das Amt und die Vergangenheit illustrates both these traits. Das Amt caused a huge stir in Germany when it was published in 2010. It was meant as a debunking of the myth, still commonly circulated around the turn of the century, that senior bureaucrats in the Foreign Office had resisted the influence of Nazi interlopers and were, thus, not to be viewed as complicit in their misdeeds. In one sense, Evans notes, the project was successful, adducing a mass of primary source evidence to show that the old hands viewed the Nazis quite sympathetically and that none but a few marginal figures engaged in anything that could seriously be termed resistance.

But Das Amt had serious flaws as well. Originally put in the hands of senior professors, it had (due to age and professional commitments) eventually been farmed out to younger scholars, several of whom were not yet in possession of their doctorates. This accounted, Evans claims, for the two main deficiencies of the project. The lack of experience and scholarly breadth lead to a narrow focus on complicity of old Foreign Office hands in the Holocaust, to the exclusion of questions of their complicity in other matters (such as the launching of a brutal imperialist war). The role of junior scholars also explains, so Evans notes, a general and very damaging lack of familiarity with the secondary literature on the topics under discussion. These problems were quite serious because although overall argument of the book was correct, the deficiencies in focus and scholarship provided footholds for injudicious criticism.

This, in a nutshell, is Evans’s approach. Responsible scholarship is a matter of both adducing relevant evidence, but also of familiarity with the current state of the art. This is of particular importance in the case of historical analysis of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Their entanglement with current political crises in Europe, as well as with the still extant streams of anti-Semitism in Western society (and elsewhere) lays a heavy burden upon those engaged in this area of scholarship. Evans has done both students and general readers a great service by holding his colleagues to account, for it is incumbent upon those who know to keep standards high.

After all, what’s a thrifty Teuton to do on a European continent so lacking in appreciation and understanding? Thank heavens, the Süddeutsche has just the thing. Angie, it tells us, should get out on the road more and show those poor Peripherians up close what an understanding gal she really is. Maybe she can stroke each and every of them on the cheek and whisper in their ears the hard truths about what it takes to be a real European: “No pain, no gain.”

But it falls to Neues Deutschland, Germany’s once and future organ of the Socialist left, to show us where the image problem really lies. Today’s front page, upper half: a German translation of the now widely circulated interview with a forlorn Yanis Varoufakis after his resignation, telling all about the negotiations that never were. Front page, bottom half: a terse reminder of how far we have–or haven’t–come to get where we are now. One of the last post-Holocaust trials before the generation that brought us “Arbeit macht frei” is completely dead and buried, and it’s “Four years for the book keeper of Auschwitz.” That’s right, the book-keeper! Four years. This is not quite as much time as Germany’s Strangelove of fiscal discipline, Dr. Wolfgang Schäuble, has had to decimate the Greek economy. But do I really need to elaborate on the symmetry here? Ach, the image problem!

Make no mistake about it: in Europe, the German Diktat is back with a vengeance, and with it the old nationalist halo of German cultural supremacy is starting ever so gradually to flicker on again, like a light bulb after a power outage. No amount of solemnly orchestrated Holocaust remembrance days or punctual professions of love for “the European idea” can keep this hidden for long. As Varoufakis said in his illuminating interview: in the Eurogroup, it all worked “like an orchestra”, and the conductor — well, who said the days of the authoritarian Chef-Dirigent were over and done with?

Everywhere you look in the German media, it seems, that old banality of evil is letting its numbers-crunching face be seen. Especially on television, and especially on the talk shows, which are stacked to the ceiling with “Eurogroupies” of the Merkel/Schäuble variety. Frequently, this face wears the thick-rimmed glasses of a credentialized expert in economics. Just as often, it’s a well-groomed politician from the one of the Christian Democratic sister parties.

Usually, the face drones on above a neatly ironed tie about “abiding by treaties”, about the evils of Greek bureaucracy, about how the new government in Athens never does its “homework” or makes “concrete proposals”, about how the Greeks just refuse to roll up their sleeves and turn that old jalopy of a clientelist economy into the burnished Latvian or Slovakian or Irish race car of modern Euro-competitiveness. Usually the face lies bald-facedly about what’s actually happened in those other laboratories of austerity, or about what was or wasn’t said in the endless Troika negotiations, or about who offered this and refused that. And more often than not, the lies go unchallenged.

To be sure, the faces of German austerity aren’t usually as uncannily Adolph-Eichmann-like in their appearance as Jens Spahn from the CDU, who just last night on the “Anne Will” talk show repeated the ubiquitous line about how Tsipras “walked away from the negotiating table” before the Greek referendum. (Who was it that coined that phrase about lies becoming truths by repetition?) The face is just as likely to be bloated and Social Democratic, like Sigmar Gabriel, now known for his especially virulent Greece-bashing, which is neither very social nor very democratic.

Or it might be a bit more multi-culti, like Green Party chief Cem Özdemir, who, to his credit, criticizes Merkel & Co., but also has some stern things to say about those “unprofessional” lefties in Athens. Or it might even be as wild and crazy as the European Green Party’s favorite child-love-advocate-turned-war-monger, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who told Anne Will that, while he disapproves of the way Merkel is doing things, that doesn’t mean he was for the “Oxi”, which he actively campaigned against. These days on the German TV-talk circuit, real leftists and–yes–actual Greeks are few and far between.

We’ve entered a dark period for Germany’s image, no question about it. All those years of paying for police protection in front of any Jewish place of business, worship or remembrance. All those little brass Stolpersteine to remind us at once of the victims of Germany’s own brand of militarized exceptionalism and of Germany’s exceptional post-war remorse. All that expense of moral capital, all that famous reservedness about wars of choice in far-flung places, all that enthusiasm for the transnational European idea– and where are we now? In Europe, once again, we’re at the treacherous intersection of rising nationalism, finance-driven “techno-democracy”, and flailing capitalism. For Germany, and even more so for Greece, this is much more than just an image problem.